We all know that the shopping comparison engines are heavy marketers on the pay per click engines. But with Yahoo Search Marketing’s (YSM) new guidelines, the shopping comparison engines will not be allowed to bid on trademarked terms.
The current YSM rules regarding bidding on trademarked terms can be found here. The restrictions that I’m focusing in on are as follows. The advertiser must be an Information Site and Not Competitive:
The primary purpose of the advertiser’s site is to provide substantial information (for example, detailed product reviews or comparisons provided by unbiased sources, commentary, or news information) about the trademark owner or products or services bearing the trademark,
AND
the advertiser’s site does not sell or promote, and is not an affiliate or partner of an entity that sells or promotes, a product or service that directly or indirectly competes with the trademark owner’s products or services.The advertiser’s title and description must disclose the nature of the qualifying substantial information that the consumer will find on the advertiser’s site.
I’m not sure who this is aimed at…but doesn’t this effect every shopping comparison engine as well as pretty much all the heavy advertisers on YSM? With the restrictions above, companies like Circuit City can’t bid on terms like iPod, Nikon Coolpix, or any other product they sell.
Let’s make sure I’m following Yahoo!…
The shopping comparison engines meet the first half of the requirement. These sites do offer substantial information about the ‘trademark owner or products or services bearing the trademark.’
However, they do NOT meet second half of the requirement. The shopping comparison engines DO promote and are affiliates or partners of entities that sell or promote, a product or service that directly or indirectly competes with the trademark owner’s products or services. This is THE business these companies are in…they are comprehensive product databases of competing products.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Type in ‘ipod nano’ on Yahoo!
You’ll find sponsored listings from BizRate, PriceGrabber, and Calibex.
If you click on the BizRate listing, you’re brought to a page full of iPod nanos, but at the bottom of the page, there’s a section called ‘Related Searches in MP3 & Media Players’ which lists competing products like iRiver and Lyra. A violation YSM’s guidelines.
I could just as easily provide the same example for PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, and NexTag.
My point? Are these new guidelines a joke? The shopping comparison engines are some of the largest advertisers on YSM. Is Yahoo! going to kick them off the site? What am I missing?
Great write up on this topic. I’ve been wondering about this myself. I am an affiliate and advertise with Yahoo. Yahoo occasionally removes our ads saying that they are “competitive” which they are not. If I have pages on my Web site dedicated to a merchant and that merchant’s competitors, can I not advertise on their trademarks even if the pages don’t contain the cometitor’s trademarks? I asked Yahoo and have not received an answer that gives any clarification.
Brian, I don’t think that is Yahoo’s intention at all. I think the point of this rule is to prevent direct competitors from buying each other’s keywords. Thus, “Netflix” couldn’t buy the keyword “Blockbuster.”
I suppose you could interpret this new rule to mean that a shopping comparison site couldn’t buy the word ‘Ipod’ and send the user to a page dedicated to Creative Zen mp3 players, but I doubt that Yahoo will prevent you from sending your ad to a comparison page for mp3 players.
I agree with David. YSM is not about to push away the $20M/month in ppc spend that the CSE’s make. That said, however, I do think it makes sense that they’d like to slowly phase out CSE’s in order to make room for more well-known brands whose brand recognition should lead to higher CTR.
-Chris
If this were the case my whole campaign would be wiped out. 90% of my 5000+ terms are things like ‘Calvin Klein Perfume’ under this interpretation of the rules I couldn’t bid on that term because I also sell Ralph Lauren products.
I think what YSM is trying to kill here is my bidding on the names of my competitors stores like ‘Perfumania’ or ‘Sephora’. They also want to knock out the people bidding on ‘iPod’ and only selling zen MP3 items. That being said they are yet to pull my bids on such terms…
If they take this to the Nth degree they will wipe out a massive amount of their advertisers. They are going after the dirty bits of the bath water, not the baby.
Here is what I think that is missing from the picture:
YSM, similar to Google Adwords do not hold a list of all trademarks and do not take any widespread automatic action. Both companies basically see trademark issues as something that needs to be resolved between the TM owner and whoever is using and potentially infringing, and they both mention this on various pages of their websites. On the other hand, if a TM owner files a complaint, they would investigate and take action. Google, for example, would allow the keyword to be used but would not allow the TM to be displayed in the actual ad.
So…
It really is up to the owner of the trademark! If I owned Circuit City I would get YSM and Adwords to take action against someone using “Circuit City” as a keyword or in an ad. On the other hand, if I owned Apple (wouldn’t that be great?!), I wouldn’t take action, at least not a general one, against people using the term iPod, as this would also cause damage to legitimate iPod merchants.
Dave’s analysis makes sense. In general, Google/Yahoo will be working in a reactive mode. These guidelines are meant to discourage misleading behavior from various manufacturers and service providers (GEICO vs. Google case despite the outcome of that case). Any manufacturer of a product and/or service provider that uses a distribution channel relies on active marketing/selling of these trademarked terms by these channels, hence it is neither in their interest nor in Google/Yahoo’s interest to discourage that.
Shopping comparison engines are a channel for various products, and neither the retailers nor the manufacturers will have an issue unless of course you advertise for product “x” and take the user to a page for product “y”. BizRate example I think will pass the test since the page is primarily for ipod nano.